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We shouldn’t ruin Planet A in our attempt to switch over to Plan B. The amount of geoengineering needed to make Mars hospitable would solve all environmental
by IAmEveryone 6y ago
We shouldn’t ruin Planet A in our attempt to switch over to
Plan B.
The amount of geoengineering needed to make Mars hospitable would solve all environmental problems on earth five times over.
- subjectsigma 6y agoIf you try a terraforming experiment on Mars and it fails, nobody's life/house/country/etc is ruined, which isn't true of geoengineering on Earth. I agree with the sentiment that there really is no Plan B to fixing climate change but that doesn't mean the goals of space colonization and fixing climate change are contrary.
- imhoguy 6y agoOnly if the entire process is self-sufficient. For now we are burning precious Earth resources to do anthing in space.
- giantrobot 6y agoPrecious? The primary elements "wasted" in space exploration are aluminum, silicon, hydrogen, and oxygen. All of those things Earth is just lousy with. Even launching a rocket a day wouldn't put any sort of dent in the availability of any of those elements. A rocket a day also wouldn't meaningfully add to levels of harmful pollution. The Earth is really big. It has lots of pretty much everything. Doing stuff in space is expensive in an economic sense but it's not really all that resource intensive. Most of the cost is paying people to design, test, fabricate, and operate the hardware.
- imhoguy 6y agoOk, but to put a rocket in space you need a surrounding economy on a specific technological level which is costly resourcewise. Could SpaceX or NASA happen in e.g. Congo, Nepal or Papua New Guinea alone?
- jjk166 6y agoWell okay, we can stop exploring space when we dismantle the entire industrialized world.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoTerraforming on Mars would take millennia, and over that long amount of time, settlement would presumably continue and the amount of colonists would grow. Thus, eventually flaws in the terraforming effort would eventually impact on local people.
- jelliclesfarm 6y agoThis assumes that there aren’t other life forms in space/planets.